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Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Bookmarking Woes

As I've been meeting and working with various teachers, one common theme I hear is "I found this great site I wanted to use in class, but I can't remember where I found it." When I was teaching high school English, I encountered a similar problem. I would bookmark the site in Firefox, but when I got to school I couldn't remember which one it was on the long list of bookmarked sites I had accumulated. Sometimes, I couldn't find the link because I had bookmarked it on my home computer and those weren't accessible once I got to school. Then when the computer crashed, I lost them all!

So what can we do to avoid these bookmarking woes? Well, there are several options, but I won't bombard you with them all. Here are the 3 I've been using this year:

Google Bookmarking - Google bookmarking is a feature that comes with our school email. You can either use the above link and then enter your school email username and password OR go to your school email, click on the MORE button - then EVEN MORE and click on Bookmarks. You can create labels, which are similar to tags, for your bookmarks and export your bookmarks. However, you cannot import bookmarks or organize them except through the labels. You are probably wondering why this is on my favorite list. Well, when I first started using this bookmarking tool over the summer, they had the option of creating lists for your bookmarks. You were able to share the lists with other individuals. Sadly, they recently eliminated this feature and I'm not as keen on Google Bookmarking as I was when I started this post.

Linkable - I was introduced to this site at my Tech Integration meeting at Essdack this fall. This has become my all time favorite because of the clean organized look. Linkable allows you to create pages and categories for organizing your bookmarks. You can share bookmark categories with your friends, other teachers or students. Here is an example of a shared category:

Some other features include importing/exporting bookmarks, adding a button to your browser to easily add links to new web pages and explore the bookmarks of other users. I use this bookmarking site on a daily basis.

Diggo - I have just started using this tool myself, but I'm liking it way better than Delicious. Here are a couple of videos introducing Diggo and showing how to use them with your students.

Who knows where my exploring will lead me with this new bookmarking tool. Perhaps it will become my new favorite tool!